Refrigerated pharmaceutical products, such as vaccines, are very sensitive to rises in temperature and the passage of time. Professionals who dispense these products know that their quality, effectiveness and safety depends, to a very large extent, on the temperature conditions at the location where they are stored, the length of time they are stored at the location before being used, as well as the total amount of time the products have been outside of refrigeration since they were manufactured.
Generally speaking, refrigerated pharmaceutical products are also valuable and expensive, which attracts a large number of companies and individuals interested in marketing and distributing generic and counterfeit versions of high-demand pharmaceutical products for financial gain. Therefore, for health, safety and liability reasons, professionals who dispense branded pharmaceutical products must also be very concerned with maintaining the appropriate level of inventory on hand, acquiring additional products only from authorized sources, verifying the authenticity of the products received from authorized sources, and keeping track of the location or dispensing of every authorized product container.
Pharmaceutical product containers are usually marked with a product's name, manufacturer and expiration date. But these details are usually checked manually and only by visual inspection, which can lead to mistakes. These mistakes can have severe, long-lasting or permanent consequences. Moreover, the product's name, manufacturer and expiration date are only three of potentially dozens of very significant details associated with a particular pharmaceutical product container, which details the dispensing professional may need to take into account at the point of dispensing the product.
For instance, in addition to knowing the product's name and expiration date, a dispensing professional often needs or wants to know how long the particular product can stay outside of refrigeration without spoiling or losing its effectiveness. She may also want or need to know how long the product actually has been outside of refrigeration, either because the product was temporarily removed from the refrigerator or because the refrigerator in which it was kept temporarily loss power. She may also wish to know whether the pharmaceutical product has been recalled, whether it is authentic or counterfeit, whether the refrigerator where the product is kept is working properly, as well as a variety of other significant details too numerous to track manually.
Unfortunately, the conventional refrigerators for pharmaceutical product containers provide no way for physicians and other health care professionals to accurately and precisely ascertain these additional product details. Therefore, there is considerable need in the healthcare industry for a refrigerator for pharmaceutical product containers which provides a variety of pertinent details about the individual product containers that are inside the refrigerator, or that are being added or removed from the refrigerator, as well as a variety of significant details concerning the status and operation of the refrigerator itself.